Putting Conservatives on
the Couch:
Transactional Analysis and the Torture Apologists
by Lila Rajivawww.dissidentvoice.org
June 17, 2004

I

n
the 60s best-seller, The Games People Play, popular psychologist Eric
Berne, creator of transactional analysis, described four types of
transactions or exchanges between people, depending on whether their ego
states felt positive or negative.

I'm OK You're Not
OK people are prone to anger and hostility and feel smug and superior.
They tend to be high achievers with the self-confidence and ruthlessness to
get what they want.. While they can at best be do-gooders patronizingly
rescuing others, they usually belittle those Not OK others as incompetent
and untrustworthy. Often competitive, power-hungry, and paranoid, at worst
they’re killers and warmongers. (1) (paraphrased from the
website of the International Association for Transactional Analysis)

A pattern has emerged
in commentary on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

First, some
commentators in the U.S. seem to be much more riled up over the effect on
the U.S. image than over the gravity of the abuse. Taking their cue from the
President’s “that’s not the way we do things in America,” they’ve taken to
telling the story in a way that’s passing familiar to any one who’s watched
the national press corps in action.

When the story first
broke, to a man these pundits were afflicted with a severe case of
pedantry. Never was there so much scholarly hemming and hawing, so many ifs
and maybes, so many arcane whereas’s. The abuse was “alleged,” the reports
were “hearsay,” more investigation needed to be done. Anyway, even if the
stories were true, they showed that the American system worked since people
were held accountable for their actions. Despite the bad actions of a few,
Abu Ghraib was ultimately a vindication of democracy, we were still a nation
of laws not men, etc., etc.

Listening to all the
qualifications and parentheses passed around in the days after the story
broke, we could have been at a convention of out-of-work human-rights
lawyers. Considering what went on at Abu Ghraib, perhaps we should have
been.

Since then, the
reactions of movement conservatives from Victor Hansen to Newt Gingrich have
sounded like the mutterings of a patient working through transactional
analysis therapy:

We don’t know what
happened,
but whatever it was, they did worse.
We’re ok, they’re not ok.

We don’t know who did
it,
but whoever it was, it was them, not us.
They’re not ok, but we’re ok.

We don’t know if it
happened,
but if it did, they did worse,
because we’re ok, they’re not ok.

If it happened, it’s
being investigated.
If it’s being investigated, our system works.
If our system works, you’re system doesn’t.
We’re ok, you’re not ok.

In fact Transactional
Analysis provides a convenient way to understand how otherwise intelligent
people are often unable to tell reality from fantasy. T.A. tells us that
some people don’t see things not because they’re consciously lying --
although of course they do that too -- but because their fragile sense of
themselves would be shattered if they saw themselves as other than perfect.
If they’re not the best, the brightest, the bravest, the greatest, the
strongest, then what are they? These are the people who fit the We’re OK
You’re Not OK position and their whole interaction is built around
maintaining their sense of physical, moral, or intellectual superiority over
others. That often means ignoring anything that doesn’t fit their preferred
scenario. It’s easy to recognize their tactics: they routinely deny or
distort facts either by exaggeration, minimalization, or selectivity; when
that doesn’t work, they displace facts with irrelevant or loosely-related
ones and use far-fetched logic as though it were airtight. When they’re
finally confronted with a reality they can’t argue away, they immediately
distance themselves from it and blame it on others whom they deride. It’s a
mode of functioning that almost borders on delusional. And when the delusion
becomes hard to sustain, I’m OK, You’re Not OK people will do
anything and justify anything rather than accept reality. In the end, they
don’t even understand or want reality. They just want a big solipsistic
bubble into which they can project whatever they want, good or bad.

On the benign end of
the T.A. spectrum, you can find Berne’s do-gooders. In foreign policy, these
are the liberal interventionists who want to intervene to solve every
foreign humanitarian problems no matter if they’ve been asked to or not. On
the darker end of the spectrum, there are the neo-conservative enthusiasts
of empire, bent on creative destruction in the Middle East and lebensraum
for Halliburton and Exxon.

Hansen attacks antiwar
activists and critics for being afflicted with a reflexive self-hatred which
he calls the “Western Disease.” (2)

There’s denial:

Though he’s an elegant
propagandist, Hansen’s claims hold up about as well as one of Salvador
Dali‘s melting clocks. Americans are in Iraq for the most selfless of
motives he assures us in essay after essay in the run-up to the war. Not
since King Ashoka renounced war has there been such a self-effacing power --
one which refrains from killing, enriches its enemies, turns the other cheek
to the unruly U.N., and tiptoes around the world like an especially
tender-hearted Jain monk. This is classic denial. Hansen’s history, such
stuff as comic books are made of, seems more like the classical mythology he
studies than any reputable history. Alone among all the countries in
history, the U.S. has never conquered lawlessly he insists. He fulminates
over the Chinese conquest of Tibet but not the bloody American invasion of
the Philippines. In good Soviet propaganda style, he insists that American
conquest is always about liberation, freedom, and democracy. Thus, we’re in
Iraq to establish “consensual democracy,” whatever that is. It’s certainly
difficult to imagine what NON-consensual democracy looks like. Guantanamo,
maybe? Anyway, Hansen doesn’t get around to explaining why for this
“consensual democracy” to work, Iraqi newspapers need to be shut down and
threatened, Iraqi leaders appointed by Americans, and Iraqi elections
forbidden for fear they might return a government not to the liking of the
soi-disant coalition.

His reaction to Abu
Ghraib is filled with denial too. In an article in the Wall Street Journal
on May 3, he begins with the usual qualification that the pictures of
Americans “in some cases, allegedly torturing prisoners,” while “seemingly
inhuman” have to be seen in the context of Saddam and his “fascist and
Islamicist successors” who “do it all the time.” (3) Then
he tells us gravely that as “emissaries of human rights” Americans have of
course to be held to a higher standard than Saddam.

Irony, apparently, is
not one of the professor’s strengths. Neither is even-handedness. Although
warning us sagely about the dangers of rushing to judgment on the basis of
“lurid pictures, hearsay and leaked accounts to the New Yorker magazine,”
his article is nothing if not a desperate rush to judgment in the teeth
of quite a bit of evidence that the abuse was widespread For one thing,
lurid pictures and hearsay were NOT the basis for the allegations but
well-documented reports from major human rights organizations as well as the
army’s own internal review which was cited extensively in the New Yorker
article by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh.
(4)

Hansen also employs
distancing tactics:

He has already decided
that the “apparent transgressions” are only the deeds of a “few renegade
correctional officers” who in no way have anything to do with the general
conduct of the war.

Then there’s
displacement:

The REAL blame for Abu
Ghraib lies with the beastly trickiness of the fedayeen, who fire from
minarets and use civilians as human shields. After all, this is the enemy
which dismembered the four American contractors at Fallujah, and has killed
400 Americans since April, not to mention a number of Iraqis. Very touching
this concern for Iraqis, but why doesn’t Hansen mention the 10,000 Iraqi
civilians killed by American bombing (using conservative estimates), the
indiscriminate use of depleted uranium that leaves extensive, long-lasting,
and serious health problems, the use of cluster-bombs which cause
grotesquely hideous injuries, the intentional targeting of civilian
infrastructure and residential areas, the Gestapo-like tactics employed on
women, children, and the elderly that include breaking into homes at night,
using military dogs and strip-searches to intimidate, and the almost
routine killing of civilians at weddings, at prayers, for not stopping at
check points, or evidently just for breathing anywhere in the vicinity of
the U.S. army. And that’s besides the genocidal number of people killed
either directly during the first Gulf War or by the destruction
of hospitals, public sanitation, and water supplies during the decade of
economic sanctions and constant bombing in the illegal no-fly zones. In that
context, dismembering the bodies of four Blackwater mercenaries, a.k.a.,
hired killers, although terrible in itself, was the moral equivalent of
Palestinians fighting back at Israelis bulldozing their homes and
machine-gunning their families. But not only does Hansen detach his
assertions from any such historical context, he also likes to
solder “fascism” and “Islamism” together in the harangues he spits out in
that white-hot neo-conservative style that’s meant to gird up American loins
for regime-change in the Middle East as though it were a replay of a D-Day
maneuver.

Case in point --
Hansen trots out Daniel Pearl, the Jewish American reporter beheaded in
Pakistan. Not to get too esoteric about it, that’s the “religion-card.” In
Hansen’s gambit, cleverly engineered words like Islamist or Islamo-fascist
play the role of automatically tarring the resistance of Muslim or Arab
societies (which they conflate) against Israeli or American policies as
anti-Semitic. A term like Islamo-fascist stridently proclaims that there can
never be any reasonable grounds for objecting to whatever the U.S. or Israel
might see fit to do in the Middle East. There can never be racism on the
part of Americans or Israelis but there’s always racism among Arabs. That’s
the big lie that dazzles us and prevents us from seeing what’s staring us
right in our faces - the intense racial hatred toward Arabs that’s
coded into the saddening images from Abu Ghraib.

Finally, there’s a
generous helping of derision:

Hansen chose to
highlight the picture in which naked males are tangled in a pyramid of
flesh before a smiling female GI, although by then pictures of beaten
bodies, battered corpses, and forced group masturbation were already
available. Why? Because it is the least objectionable overtly and anyway,
what better entertainment than a screen full of humiliated Arab males? For
the last two decades, in Hollywood hokum and television punditry, in
pseudo-scholarly rants and internet chattering, these are the new
untermenschen, burqa-loving brutes on a one-way ride to a houri-ridden
heaven. That’s the image most likely to play to the gallery in America where
Islam’s fair game for a turkey-shoot by oppressed women. A picture of a
smiling female guard in the utero-topia of the American army lets Hansen
posture as a feminist striking a blow against the patriarchy even while he
blows off acts of grotesque sexual degradation as relatively tame. Of
course, the men are only superficially degraded. Their bodies and postures
actually convey all the sublime dignity of human beings in extremis. But
there’s a murky cloud of degradation around that perky GI acting out warped
orders in the fatuous belief that she’s come a long way. The homo-eroticism
of the image just adds to its choiceness. Muslim culture which taboos male
homosexual contact needs a little gay-friendly make-over by the “emissaries
of human rights.” A little sado-chic for the rag-heads, some queer eye for
the Iraqi guy.

Now that I’ve
illustrated these four techniques, it becomes clear why so many bright
people simply haven’t got it.

For instance, in the
Wall Street Journal on May 3, conservative commentator James Taranto
dismissed the torture as “alleged.” (5) Then he
added derision: “the Associated Press manages to produce an ex-prisoner,
Dhia al-Shweiri, a supporter of renegade Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who
claims the abuse he suffered at the hands of his American captors was worse
than what Saddam's henchmen meted out in the same prison. Here are the
horrors to which America subjected him: During his stay at Abu Ghraib, he
said [he] was asked to take off his clothes only once and for about 15
minutes.” Apparently, this was the only instance of torture Taranto
could find.

Taranto can’t even
plead ignorance in defense of this intellectual chicanery. The army
investigation by Major-General Taguba had already made it public that
assault, rape, and sodomy were among the felonies committed at Abu Ghraib,
yet here he is, a well-known right-wing commentator, prattling on about
“alleged” torture and snickering as though he has spotted a pair of knickers
at a garden party.

Still, Taranto
eventually beats a prudent retreat from his earlier account and concedes “to
be honest, they (the soldiers involved) sound like a bunch of losers:”
(6) He nonetheless manages to displace attention
elsewhere. He insists that the torture is really the result of the crude
material that the American military has had to work with and thus the fault
of all those lefty universities like Harvard which ought to drag back
banned ROTC and military recruiters to their campuses so that our best and
brightest can get roped into the army.

The urge to make a
molehill out of a mountain was contagious. On the very same day that the
Wall Street Journal ran a Red Cross report that the Abu Ghraib torture was
only the tip of system-wide abuse, it also carried an editorial by Newt
Gingrich that still insisted that “any effort by the anti-American left or
the Arab media to generalize the acts of a few into an attack on America, or
on America's armed forces, should be repudiated and condemned.”
(7) More distancing.

Other conservatives
simply ignored the torture story. In a TV appearance, Fox News commentator
and political CALumnist, Anne Coulter, on the loose despite a lengthy record
as a confirmed plagiarist and alleged historian, initially blamed the abuse
on “girl soldiers,” (8) but then contracted a severe case
of laryngitis about a story that was splashed on the front page everywhere
else. Long of leg and short of logic, Coulter is usually not shy about
expressing her views with all the suavity of an unmuzzled Abu Ghraib
guard-dog, so it’s not hard to guess what she’d have had to say if the
victims had been Americans. As it was, she, like fellow “girl”
conservatives Linda Chavez and Peggy Noonan, (9) managed
to shovel off the abuse onto feminism and the culture of “girly boys.”

The National Review
huffed that that the real story of Abu Ghraib was the systemic difficulty
of gathering military intelligence and not the actions of a few “dirt bags.”
(10) Well, Rumsfeld thought that too. That’s why he
signed off on the new approach to torture in the first place.

It was all a
machination of the antiwar crowd claimed The Wall Street Journal’s editorial
board sourly: “Like reporters at a free buffet, members of Congress are
swarming to the TV cameras to declare their outrage and demand someone's
head, usually Donald Rumsfeld's… The goal seems to be less to punish the
offenders than to grab one more reason to discredit the Iraq war.”
(11)

The Journal protested
a shade too loudly, breaking into cold sweat over Congress’s “bizarre
notion” that the Pentagon decision to degrade “enemy combatants” to a status
lower than prisoners of war might have had something to do with Abu Ghraib.

Charles Krauthammer,
a subtler intellect than his colleagues, did recognize the gravity of what
was at stake and acknowledged that the guilty soldiers needed to be judged
by this society’s own professed standards, not by Saddam’s, although in his
Washington Post column he was not altogether above the “they’re worse”
school of ethical thinking. But he was also smart enough to see that it was
not just that the American image had been damaged but that the damage was of
a kind that in the context of Islamic sexual mores was almost irreparable.

Yet, he too couldn’t
help turning the story into another ego-stroking transaction, a morality
play about why the U.S. was not what it looked like while Islamic societies
were whatever Krauthammer said they were:

“This war is also
about -- deeply about -- sex. For the jihadists, at stake in the war against
the infidels is the control of women. Western freedom means the end of
women's mastery by men, and the end of dictatorial clerical control over all
aspects of sexuality -- in dress, behavior, education, the arts. They prize
their traditional prerogatives that allow them to keep their women barefoot
in the kitchen as illiterate economic and sexual slaves. For the men, that
is a pretty good deal -- one threatened by the West with its twin doctrines
of equality and sexual liberation…” (12)

For
Krauthammer, American goon squads don’t reflect American society, but
jihadists do represent Islam. Who are these jihadist cultures he refers to?
Do they include, for instance, Malaysia which has been working staunchly
with the U.S. against violent Islamic groups? Or is this a valentine to the
Taliban which was midwifed by the CIA? Even in a theocratic state like
Iran, women hold senior positions in government and are given the right to
vote. Iranian officials often point out that there are more female members
in Iran's parliament than there are in the U.S. Senate. And of course Iraq
was a modern secular state where despite the brutality of Saddam’s regime
women and Christians held high-ranking positions in government.
Krauthammer’s distorted analysis is just another form of denial.

Selectively slandering
Islam on behalf of gender feminism of a kind that a good part of
conservative America Catholic and Jewish itself rejects, Krauthammer forgets
that the imposition of your own sexual mores on another society hasn’t yet
been declared a legitimate goal of foreign policy. Clearly, he’s one of
Berne’s rather patronizing do-gooders.

The Krauthammer
article reads the scandal as a faux-pas on which the Arabs are only too
eager to capitalize: “The case the jihadists make against freedom is that
wherever it goes, especially the United States and Europe, it brings sexual
license and corruption, decadence and depravity… Through this lens, Abu
Ghraib is an ‘I told you so’ played out in an Arab capital recorded on
film.”

“What happened at Abu
Ghraib was…ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of
precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe.”

Krauthammer isn’t
obtuse enough to confuse Western sexual freedoms with acts of violence and
humiliation against non-combatants but he is concerned that “jihadists” with
their “lunatic fantasies about the west” might. Perhaps he should be more
concerned that most of his conservative buddies from Rush Limbaugh to Linda
Chavez have exactly the same “lunatic fantasies” that sexual equality
always ends up in pornographic torture. Lunatic fantasies often haunt people
who have to be OK while everyone else isn’t.

In these conservative
reactions in May, the abuse is still alleged, or it’s the actions of a few
distracting from the good of the majority; it’s un-American but
being promptly investigated. The culprits will be punished and the system
shown to have worked efficiently and justly, proving once again our own
superiority. One way or other, whether they blame it on Harvard or Hefner,
feminazis or fairies, trailer-trash or toilet-training, conservatives are
clear that the torture is simply not about “us” but about “them,” those few
rotten apples souring the American pie. The techniques of outright denial or
distortion, distancing, displacement, and when all else fails, derision
ensure that blame is never attached to the general political culture in
America, or to American government policy, or to American mass opinion
itself, or to anything that could be regarded as “us.” In a democracy, that
would be unthinkable The result for all these writers is that their moral
self-satisfaction is invigorated and their faith in the official version of
events remains unshaken.

If it’s not the Delta
forces and SEALS (us),
then it’s a few bad apples (them).
If it’s not officers and gentlemen (us),
then it’s trailer-trash (them).
And we’re ok, but they’re not ok.

If it’s not
Arab-baiting (us),
then it’s anti-Semites (them).
If it’s not Muslim-hating (us),
then it’s religious crazies (them).
And we’re ok, but they’re not ok.

If it’s perverts
(them),
then it’s not our boys (us),
If it’s feminazis (them),
then it’s not our girls (us).
And of course, we’re still ok,
But they’re not ok.

But besides the
standard claim that the abuse was unrepresentative and limited, there were
more muscular defenses of what happened, defenses which identify the users
as fascists-in-progress not simply conservatives and which raise the
question of whether American public opinion is all that innocent, misled by
big bad government, and only waiting for the wool to be pulled away from its
eyes. Transactional Analysis helps here too.

One argument that
made the rounds of the right-wing circles was that the abuse wasn’t real
torture at all but just a slice of American sexual life, the kind of crude
roughhousing practiced at fraternity hazings on campuses. Friendly
joshing almost like football buddies hanging out, really. This came not from
libertarians but from self-styled populist conservatives who until then had
made careers out of skewering Hollywood and counter-cultural campuses
-- from FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, (13) from
the Weekly Standard, from CNBC. (14)

The Voltaire of the
airwaves, Rush Limbaugh added his part, “This is no different than what
happens at the Skull and Bones initiation . . . they had a good time. I'm
talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of
emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?”
(15) Oliver North agreeing with this is one thing,
(16) but it’s another when Scott McClellan, President
Bush’s press secretary, also tacitly gave it the nod. (17)
Here Limbaugh takes denial a step further. He doesn’t just deny, he delights
in what happened.

In his May 6 show,
unrepentant despite strong criticism from public interest groups, Limbaugh
offers an analysis that cuts the ground out of any defense that the abuse
was not directed specifically against Arab or Muslim culture: “And we hear
that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in
front of another. Sounds to me like it's pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in
the context of war this is pretty good intimidation -- and especially if you
put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab
world. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver.
Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was a lot of
humiliation of people who are trying to kill us -- in ways they hold dear.
Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.”
(18)

What is the right
context, which is the welcoming culture in which sexual molestation and
beatings are welcomed? Christian or should we say post-Christian societies
tolerate high levels of sexuality and nudity, but there’s not much doubt
about the outrage that would have erupted had a Christian soldier been
stripped and had his genitals wired by taunting Muslims with digital
cameras.

But Limbaugh thinks
it’s all just “good old American pornography.” (19) “Have
you people noticed who the torturers are?” he squealed gleefully on his May
3 show, “Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture ... You
know, if you look at -- if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I
mean, I don't know if it's just me, but it looks just like anything you'd
see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage.”

And who could possibly
object to Madonna, that all-American icon, jeering at his privates in
public? So much for a cultural conservative who on every other day never
tires of railing against the immoral Hollywood elites on behalf of heartland
American values.

And it's not only that
“the babes were the torturers.” Limbaugh serves up another version of the
torturer-as-emissary-of-human rights: the pictures are also a display of gay
sexuality: “We have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard
good old American pornography, the Britney Spears or Madonna concerts.”

Let’s get this clear
-- the most prominent media personality of the resurgent conservative
movement isn’t blaming sadistic torture on feminism or homosexuality as
his colleagues are doing. He’s not distancing himself from the torture by
displacing anger onto feminists or homosexuals. He’s claiming that sadistic
torture IS feminism and homosexuality or at least enough to make
what’s going on at Abu Ghraib a kissing cousin of the American entertainment
industry and elite college campuses. Yet, at the same time, he also blames
the public outrage over the photos on “the feminization of this country.”
Apparently, feminism is all-American when it yields sadism but
anti-American when it leads to moral outrage over sadism. For a cultural
conservative to break into such jubilant whoops in a position this
convoluted, Limbaugh must be taking lessons in the Kamasutra.

And here Limbaugh
moves out of the range of respectable opinion altogether. Hansen and Taranto
also equivocated about the occurrence and the level of the abuse but Hansen
did say it was inhuman and Taranto quickly abandoned his earlier denials by
May 6. But on May 7, when Limbaugh is claiming that no one got injured, the
Washington Post had already published more stories from detainees who had
collapsed from beatings, Secretary Rumsfeld had admitted in front of the
Senate Armed Services Committee that the pictures still remaining were even
more sadistic and inhuman, (20) and Sen. Lindsey Graham
(R) had specified that murder and rape were among the felonies committed.
While Rumsfeld was vehemently denying accusations that the abuse was not
driven by a policy, Limbaugh was delighting in the brilliance of that policy
and reveling in the way it had targeted Islam so cleverly.

Other commentators,
didn’t even pretend that “nobody got hurt.” Cal Thomas thinks fighting
Muslims has a bottom line before which objections to torture have to yield:

“It is good and right
to have such a high standard, but not good if that standard is one-sided and
undermines what we are trying to achieve in Iraq.…..All that matters is
victory. Anything less is defeat.” (21)

Don Feder resurrects
media myths we thought had been buried:

“Remember Jessica
Lynch, the American private who was captured by the Iraqi army? Lynch was
gang-raped (anally) by her captors.” (22)

Lynch and her family
of course have always insisted that she was treated well by her Iraqi
captors. (23) But that’s really beside the point, because
it’s clear that Feder is only interested in a diatribe against “Muhammed’s
Mob.”

This is where the need
among conservatives to maintain their superiority over others reveals its
true fascist face. Krauthammer, for instance, had to show that Islamic
societies were in some way ethically deficient before he could maintain his
I’m OK You’re Not OK stance, so he picked on their denial of
Western-style freedoms to their women. Krauthammer you might say is the
do-gooder and humanitarian interventionist. Somewhat smug yes, but the word
“good” and “humanity” at least form a part of his rationale. But Limbaugh
and Don Feder don’t even need that. Difference not inferiority is what they
loathe. Difference IS inferiority. Islam qua Islam is the
demon to be exorcized to inflate their own megalomania. In that quest, facts
are an unwelcome intrusion. Whereas Krauthammer only fudges, Feder lies
outright. When lies are not ready at hand, than distortion is used. Iraq did
nothing to the U.S.? Never mind, just bring in Muslim violence against
Christians in the Sudan. Conflate the Taliban in Afghanistan with the
Muslims in India, who have been victims of the Hindu majority. What’s logic
got to do with it? For good measure, drag in the Crusades a thousand years
ago to justify mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians today. What
Feder and Cal Thomas and Limbaugh are preaching is selective history as an
apology for collective punishment. Or selective punishment for collective
history. It really doesn’t matter which. Either way, there no longer needs
to be any rationale at all to justify our rightness. There just has to be an
“other”, “a difference.”

The apologists for
torture can’t maintain their sense of themselves without their sense of
being always everywhere the good guys, always everywhere free from human
limitations, free from human imperfections, not just more powerful and
richer but also better in every other way.

And that’s why no
matter how many books and columns and essays lay out every trivial and
monumental deception of this war, every deviation and delinquency, some
people are never going to see things differently. Some people are going to
see what they want to see because it justifies what they want to do. It’s
not because they don’t know, or even that they don’t want to know. It’s that
they can’t afford to know. Knowledge would destroy their sense of self.

If it’s not a few
soldiers (them),
then it’s the government.
If it’s the government,
then it’s the public (us),
If it’s the public,
then we’re not ok.

And that’s not ok.

Lila Rajiva
is a freelance writer in Baltimore currently working on a book about the
press. She has taught music at the
Peabody Preparatory, and English and Politics at the University of Maryland
and Towson University.